Mobile Games Market Trends

Which trends are the hottest right now in mobile gaming industry? Which direction is the market moving? What
trends can be found within specific genres? To answer these questions, we analyzed 1500 games present on the US Grossing TOP-500 of
Google Play and App Store from April 2017 to April 2018.

Genre Popularity

The diagram shows the distribution of genres in US Grossing TOP-500 games list in April 2018 (cumulatively for
two stores).

More than half of the top is occupied by Battler, Strategy, Casino and Puzzle games. This situation has
not changed in years, and there are no reasons to expect it to change in the near future.

The top is occupied by more complicated games. 96% of the top grossing games unite complicated gameplay
and a wide range of mechanics. All the "simple" games, except for a few representatives of the Action genre,
are Arcades.

Genre Dynamics

Among the 1500 games we analyzed, we identified those which rose on the list and those which lost their
positions over the year. Here is the genre percentage for both the former and the latter.

The popularity and profitability of Action, Casual and RPG games is increasing. The percentage of these
genres among the games that are rising is larger than among the ones that are going down.

Puzzle, Strategy and Family genres are represented by numerous old games that are slowly losing their
positions; successful newcomers are few and far between. This might be explained by the fact that new games
in these genres offer nothing drastically new to players, opting instead to copy the gameplay from market
leaders.

Trends Within Genres

Games differ within each genre. We have analyzed the gameplay in each of the 1500 top games and identified
subgenres within the genres. The full version of the report provides full understanding of the market and its
hot trends. See the report format based on this example of Strategy genre analysis.